Is Bob McDonnell a Moderate?

Cecile Richards, the President of the Planned Parenthood
Federation of America, has an article in the Huffington Post about the extremely conservative Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, Bob McDonnell. The man is beyond anti-choice, and is especially against unmarried people’s right to use contraception and women in the workplace (both, apparently, result in the breakdown of society).

Recently, the thesis he wrote while at Pat Robertson’s Regent University was investigated by the Washington Post. McDonnell has been claiming himself to be a moderate politician, but since he wrote the thesis at the age of 34, one has to wonder how much he’s really evolved.

From the Washington Post:

"The thesis is a wistful ode to a bygone 1950s America, when, Mr. McDonnell noted, 70 percent of American families were led by working fathers and homemaker mothers, and ‘every state in the union made sexual intercourse between unmarried persons a crime.’ Sounding at times like an Old Testament prophet, Mr. McDonnell wrote that government must discriminate in favor of married couples and against ‘cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators,’ for ‘[t]he cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer.’"

When questioned about the thesis, McDonnell claimed it was just an "academic exercise," and cited examples where his opinions have changed, including his support for child day care in a welfare-reform bill. Nonetheless, given how extreme his thesis is, voters in Virginia should be skeptical.